In his autobiography, G.K. Chesterton, the great 19th century British author, describes a formative early experience. “The very first thing I can ever remember seeing with my own eyes was a young man walking across a bridge. He had a curly moustache and an attitude of confidence verging on swagger.”
The man, we’re told, was carrying a key across a bridge that led to a tall tower. The tower contained a woman, about which he says, “I cannot remember in the least what she looked like; but I will do battle with anyone who denies her superlative good looks.”
This scene was of a toy theater, a kind of diorama that his father had made for him and placed in his nursery. Such a toy might seem unimpressive to an adult, but to the young Chesterton there was nothing more sublime, “…that one scene glows in my memory like a glimpse of some incredible paradise; and, for all I know, I shall still remember it when all other memory is gone out of my mind.”
This early aesthetic experience was a critical moment in Chesterton’s formation. In it, he felt “the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be the truth.” That philosophy, as he describes in Orthodoxy, was the Christian faith.
Chesterton wasn’t the only British author to have such an experience. In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis also tells of an aesthetic childhood experience prompted by a diorama. “Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew….As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”
These men both glimpsed Paradise in miniature. Chivalry and nature, scaled down, called out to them and they never recovered.
As I reflect on these two remarkably similar experiences, I am curious about the significance of childhood wonder. Are we formed in some way through our encounters with longing? Leon Wiesltierjan seems to believe that we are. In his essay, Among the Disrupted, he claims that humanism has an underlying pedagogy. It makes claims about how we learn. Namely, he says that personal cultivation happens “…by means of textual study and aesthetic experience.”
Most of us are anxious for our kids to become literate. We want them to develop a love of reading and to engage with important works of literature. But, if Wiesltierjan is right, people who love reading are still only half formed. Kids need beauty as much as they need truth. And, as Lewis and Chesterton’s stories show, they don’t have to travel far to find it. It could be waiting in a toy theater or in the lid of a biscuit tin.